Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/500

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NOTES -AND QUERIES. [9 th s. vm. DEC. u, 1901.

and which was fought a short distance from London. Mr. Murphy, one of the principals, was shot. He lived in St. George's Road, South wark. Mr. Livermore, who was well known to Mr. Cuming, was almost dead with fright, his fear being that he would be hanged, and his terrors positively had the symptoms of delirium tremens. Miss Cuming tried to fix the exact date of the encounter by some contemporary event, but failed. Mr. Cuming, from an independent standpoint, has been trying to narrow the limits within which the fatal shot was fired, and thinks it must have been between the years 1836 and 1842. In Chambers s Journal of 12 January, 1895, "the last duel "is stated to have been fought in a field in a solitary part of Hollo- way in 1843. The principals were Col. Fawcett and Lieut. Munro. On this point not much information is, I think, to be gleaned either from John Cockburn's ' History of Duels' (1884) or from George Neilson's 'Trial by Combat' (1890). See also John Ashton's ' Dawn of the Nineteenth Century.'

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL. Wimbledon Park Road.

Your correspondent will find in 'A Contents-Subject Index' (1900), by A. Cot- greave, references to nineteen works or magazine articles on duelling, both in the British Isles and on the Continent. In addi- tion thereto, in 1891 Carl A. Thimm published 'A Complete Bibliography of the Art of Fence, including Duelling,' which contains a long list of duels fought in England, France, and Italy. ' N. & Q.' (8 th S. ix. 230) furnishes par- ticulars of, I believe, the last duel in England, the death of one of the parties, and trial of the other for murder.

EVERARD HOME COLEMAN.

71, Brecknock Road.

The last duel was between the Earl oi Cardigan and Capt. Tuckett, 12 September 1840, and an abstract of the proceedings before the magistrates is given in ' Interesting Incidents in Wandsworth History,' by Cecil T Davis, published by Burleig'h, 79, Higt Street, Wandsworth, 1900

ALBERT A. BARKAS.

Free Library, Richmond, Surrey.

Mr. Carl A. Thimm's 'Complete Biblio graphy of the Art of Fence, comprising tha

of Duelling,' first edition, 1891, seconc

edition, 1896, will supply an abundance o material. \y. c.

CHARLES WESLEY, GEORGE LILLO, AND JOHN HOME (9 th S. viii. 402).-The parallel trom Lillo is interesting, but we need not

uppose that Wesley was borrowing from im. The thought is, in fact, a commonplace n literature, and for aught I know may >erhaps be traced to the ancients. Shak- peare has, in ' Macbeth,' I. vii. 6 :

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, .*., time as contrasted with eternity. Dr. A.ldis Wright, in" his note on the line, says,

Human life is compared to a narrow strip )f land in an ocean," and quotes from Moore :

A narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas, The past, the future, two eternities.

Jowley thus apostrophizes life : Thou weak-built isthmus, that dost proudly rise Up betwixt two eternities.

Che author of ' Hymn Studies ' has furnished in apt parallel from the Spectator, No. 590, 6 September, 1714 :

"In our speculations of eternity we consider the ime which is present to us as the middle, which divides the whole line into two equal parts. For }his reason many witty authors compare the present rises in the midst of an ocean immeasurably dif- used on either side of it."
 * ime to an isthmus, a narrow neck of land, that

The words I have italicized seem to show con- clusivety that Charles Wesley had this passage in his thought when he wrote,

Lo ! on a narrow neck of land, &c. But, besides this, he undoubtedly remem- bered a couplet in his favourite poem, Prior's ' Solomon ':

Amid two seas, on one small point of land, Wearied, uncertain, and amazed we stand.

Nor is it likely that he would forget, as he wrote, two familiar lines in Pope's ' Essay on Man':

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state. Ep. ii.

His time a moment, and a point his space. Ep. i., the latter of which seems to find an echo in Charles Wesley's line :

A point of time, a moment's space, where, however, the original reading was " a point of life." Young, too, another favourite author of Charles Wesley's, calls life "a narrow isthmus betwixt time and eternity " ('On Pleasure,' letter iii.). And John Wesley, probably drawing from the same sources as his brother, writes in 1747, " I desire to have both heaven and hell ever in my eye, while I stand on this isthmus of life, between these two boundless oceans."

This last parallel illustrates a point of dif- ference, not yet, I believe, noticed by any one in print, in Charles Wesley's adaptation of the common thought. The last two lines of the verse seem to show that from his point of view the " two unbounded seas" were not the two eternities, past and future, but the